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It’s an axiom that’s as old as politics: give a political hack an inch and s/he’ll try take a mile. Sarah Palin, anyone? Steve King? Ted Cruz? Rand Paul? The hack list is, literally miles long, and it can wear one out just pondering it.

Personally, I prefer that other world, the natural world ‘out there’ where in any crevice no matter how small or in any expanse no matter how large or how distant, there exists sufficient allure to captivate the soul and mind of the poet, the artist, the scientist, or even simply the curious. Consider, for example, the following small handful of photographs. Each is simply a fleeting moment’s capture of a split second of time, the content of a single point of ‘space’ ranging in size from a square inch or less to untold tens of thousands of miles. To some, photographs of the natural world are more than simply a graphic record; they are, in fact, a bit of poetry ohne worte, or poetry without words, and perhaps in that sense they stand as evidence that John Keats was absolutely correct when he noted that The poetry of earth is never dead.

Without further ado, a few moments of time, of space that happened to wander by in just the last few days.

Happy Little Bee in a White Rose

Three unrelated but Busy and Buzzy Bugs on/in a wild sunflower

‘Insect Inside’ his sunflower’s dining room

August 2014’s Full Moon at dawn’s first light, 6:22AM (MDT)

August 2014’s Full Moon about to set behind the Rocky Mtn. Front Range; 6:38AM MDT

Interesting to note that the amount of time captured in those five photos combined totals less than one second. The amount of captured ‘space’, meanwhile, ranges from a square inch or less in each of the flower/bug photos to the full moon’s visible surface area of a bit more than 8.5 million square miles. As for distance of the subject from the lens at the time the shutter was tripped, it ranges from two inches to 250,000 miles. Ah, the virtues of technology!

OK. Finally, and last but not least, a single (pictorial) summation of the entire of the Natural World’s opinion of the typical human’s anti-nature and pro-stupid mystique, all on full display within a square inch or two of the REAL world:

Unidentified bug MOONing the WORLD from his private Sunflower!

There you have it: one happy bug both summing up and ‘saluting’ — with total perfection — the nefariousness of the bulk of the earth’s human species. I suspect if he could put it all into words, he might express his thoughts and direct his worthy criticisms in much the same fashion as did William Wordsworth in his masterwork entitled Ode on Intimations of Immortality:

The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose, The Moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

The problem, of course, is that these days there are only a relatively small handful of humans with the ability to understand, much less feel any sense of lament. And sadly, not a damn one of them seems to be in much of a position to turn the tide away from destruction, away from greed, away from politics. Maybe if ‘they’ simply paused and took a look around? Nah. As John Ruskin so eloquently summed up the human condition a century or more ago,

“Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can SEE.”

Personally, I think I prefer the company of bugs, and flowers, mountains, the moon, and everything else ‘out there’ to politicians, and industrialists, and rich dudes, and stup . . . well, y’know.

It’s been a month or so now since discontinuing my smart phone service. It’s basically useless where I live and I became concerned about the fact that it seemed to be receiving and transmitting data even when I wasn’t using it. Overloaded with apps I didn’t use and could not remove that had a continual queue of updates… and expensive monthly charges.
I don’t miss it, and doing a little photo ‘shoot’ in memory of Edward Abbey seems worth more than the hundred bucks I might get for it on E-Bay… the smart phone has a much smaller screen than Ed’s one-eyed cathode ray tube beast, for safety’s sake I’m going to substitute a handgun as the instrument of mercy.😉

you can buy premuddied shoes…stone washed jeans with strategic ‘worn’ holes in them. I.e. you can pay extra to buy worn out clothes at high fashon stores, or you can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar at a flea market.

Mud? How pedestrian. You want some dirt, I got genuine full strength 100% chicken shit on my footwear. Highly corrosive, guaranteed for the lifetime of the shoe (not very long, all the better for a disposable economy) and the smell? You’ll never have to trim that nose hair again. (Sorry Gillette)
Impress your urban BFF with these symbols of just how much you care!

Years (make that decades) ago, I was involved in a small enterprise that attempted to make some good use of chicken shit. We worked a deal with an egg production outfit in S. Calif. wherein their chicken shit (lots of it) was hauled off, mixed with sawdust (from a sawmill not far away) and composted. The result was a (garden) fertilizer that contained an N-P-K balance that was in the vicinity of, iirc, 3-6-3, all in a rich and composted organic base. We bagged it up for sale, called it Eco-Dyne. Problem was, for it to be called a fertilizer the NPK percentages had to be reliable and precisely as the label stated. Because of the variabilities implicit in the chicken shit / sawdost composting process, they weren’t, and since our label wasn’t precise, the bureaucrats . . . well, you know. So we quit marketing the stuff, gave most of what we had produced and bagged away (to a lot of people who were very happy with the stuff). Chalked it up to the learning process, the one which says that if you’re trying to sell a product that is in any way regulated, you better have a bigger bank account than the one we had.

Still, I can say with authority that chicken shit, properly handled, can be quite useful because of its NPK balance that is not typical of most shit.

I’ve got way more than I’m interested in and have gotten used to it which is scary enough. It was funny to think that shoes with dirt on them could perhaps come into vogue. Not that they’d ever put me on the cover…

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. For instance. Why didn’t the very first release from the PD identify the dead kid as a “robbery suspect”? Something like; “A robbery suspect is dead after an altercation with a Ferguson police officer. The investigation is ongoing and further details will be released as they are known”?

Well, ya know, the ‘robbery suspect’ was nothin’ but a ni**er kid, so what the hell difference does it all make other than right now there’s one less of ’em.

I know how that sounds; in the late sixties I lived in St. Louis County for two years. Back in those days, most of the blacks lived in the city of St. Louis (which is NOT in St. Louis County, it’s an entity unto itself). The County was/is suburbia, and way back then it was mostly white and intended to stay that way forever. Bottom line was that at my young age back then, I had never encountered the racial hatred and fear that pretty much seemed to define the entire area. Looks to me as though the only thing that’s changed is that the *reason* for the fear and hatred has spread from the city into suburbia. Oh, the horror.

I remember thinking way back then that metro St. Louis probably defined the way the country was heading, that racism would be the prime mover in this country’s ultimate downfall and demise. In spite of a respite or two over the last four decades, I see no reason to believe that things have changed for the better, but I see plenty of evidence that they continue to change for the worse. Sickens me.

A grand jury indicted Gov. Rick Perry on Friday on charges of abuse of power and coercion as part of an ethics inquiry into his veto of funding for the state’s public integrity unit.

The inquiry began last summer after a ethics complaint was filed, alleging that Perry had improperly used a veto to deny funding for the unit, which is housed in the Travis County district attorney’s office and focuses on government corruption and tax fraud.

He is now appropriately vetted to run for President in 2016. Hopefully, every candidate they have will be on trial or convicted by the primaries.